Cooking with Children

The more that children are encouraged to help with the cooking, the less likely they are to become picky eaters. I don’t say there’s a magic formula to ensure they’re never faddy or fussy or hampered by bizarre prejudice, but you will improve your chances of having children who enjoy food if they are part of the enjoyable process of making it. Most children like eating what they cook and are proud of doing it.

My own early memories are of wobbling on a wooden chair pushed up against the New World cooker, stirring my mother’s white sauce. I often cook one-handed, with my daughter on a chair stirring or inspecting, and my still-just-baby son on my left hip, licking a wooden spoon or doing a bit of stirring with it himself. My daughter, aged three, would come into the kitchen and say, ‘Lovely! Garlic!’ when she smelt the cooking, or detected by the smell that a chicken had been put in the oven, or some pea-pods were being simmered into a stock on the hob. That’s not genius, but a feeling for and interest in food: much more important.